Olya and her Blue Eyes

How to shoot in a hotel room so small you need to open a window to change your mind.

Hong Kong is the most vertical city in the world. We’ve got nearly twice as many buildings over 150 meters tall as New York, and they’re scattered over most inhabitable parts of the city. There’s precious little space for expansion outward, so the city expands upward. We all live (and work!) on top of one another, often in shockingly small, equally shockingly expensive spaces.

I mention this as context for today’s shoot, which has set a new record for the tiniest space I’ve yet attempted to shoot art-nude photography in. I’m not carrying a tape measure around with me and meticulously recording data in an Excel spreadsheet or anything, but I’m pretty sure this hotel room wins (loses?) on crampeditude. (Crampedness. Crampedity? Cramption!) I’m used to shooting in small venues here; in fact I’ve come to expect it unless I’m shelling out for a bigger studio space. (Thank you, Patreon supporters - you help me to do that!) Still, the place immediately struck me as particularly diminutive.

Olya, the Ukrainian model du jour, wholeheartedly agreed with me about the room, assuring me that she was as shocked as I was upon seeing the place. And this was on the top floor of the building, where hotels usually keep the nice rooms. I shudder to think what the lower floors must look like. Ever the optimist, you counter that surely the view must be quite something all the way up there. A great view, yes… of Tsing Yi, Hong Kong’s largest and busiest shipping hub. I’ll let you, the viewer, interpret the juxtaposition of the discordant themes of a nude model and heavy industry as you like.

Not without its challenges, then, this one. Still, there were reasons for optimism, not least of which was Olya herself. Mature, experienced, beautiful – she was easy to work with and even easier to photograph. I often instruct the model to mix eye contact with looking away from the camera for variety, but with Olya I found myself preferring the full force of her gaze, piercing the lens with those deep blue eyes. (They’re even more striking in person, if you can believe it.)

This post continues over at my Patreon page. You can read the rest of the writeup there, as well as see many more photos from my session with Olya, available for high resolution download. You can get two posts just like this one per month by subscribing there, plus lots of other perks.